Great TV shows never really die – and neither do some fairly terrible ones, if they have enough fans. Since being cancelled in the eighties, Vixens From The Void, a BBC show crossing Star Trek with Dynasty, has lived on due to a core group of followers who really put the “fan” in “fanatical”. And so script editor Mervyn Stone finds himself, twenty years later, at ConVix 15, a convention for all things Vixens. There’s even an actress there who was in more than one episode…

Mervyn has enough on his plate trying to be in the right place at the right time (and, on occasion, with the right woman), but when Simon Josh, the organiser of the convention, apparently commits suicide, his eye for plot errors starts him looking more closely into the death. Mervyn may not know much about suicides, but surely it’s rather odd for someone to write two very different suicide notes…

And so the blog turns full circle – don’t worry/celebrate, I’m not stopping – with this re-read of the very first book that I first reviewed back in December 2010. I’ve mentioned it a few times as one of the reasons that I started the blog, the existence of a modern novel that embraced the whodunnit elements of the classic era while still doing something new with the genre. Why read it again? I’ve been meaning to for a while, but when Nev Fountain replied to a tweet of mine recently, I noticed that he’s got a new book coming out this year. And while it’s not a Mervyn Stone mystery, it does involve Vixens From The Void, so I thought it was time to revisit this, along with the other two books in the series.

I sort of want to say that I’d forgotten how much fun this book is, but that’s not really true. I remembered how much I laughed when reading it, but the memory has cheated before. I’m delighted to say that this is not the case this time though. The book is still hilarious. Admittedly, some of the jokes probably hit harder for me as a devotee of the Doctor with his many faces, but I was delighted to spot some things that I didn’t the first time – the running joke in the recurring panel itineraries that pepper the book, for example.

I’ve never been to a sci-fi convention, apart from 1983 at Longleat, a lovely exercise in seeing queues in the wild, but it’s clear that Nev has – he’s also written a bucketload of Doctor Who audio adventures, all of which are essential listening for fans of the Time Lord. He hasn’t convinced me to change this habit – the most extreme that I’ve seen at mystery conventions is one bloke who dressed up as Poirot.

What I had forgotten is that on top of the sci-fi humour, there’s a level of bedroom-farce going on – I’d definitely forgotten some of the stuff involving Vanity Mycroft when I listened to the audio adventure The Axeman Cometh (which I still maintain is one of the cleverest uses of the audio format ever).

The mystery is loads of fun too, and the motive, as I’ve said before, is possibly unique in crime fiction. Despite it being hinted at so heavily throughout, the reader won’t spot it – it’s absolutely genius.

What is ridiculous is how few people seem to have read this – only 21 reviews on Amazon? So let’s sort this out – it’s available as an ebook or paperback for a fiver (or the three books for an, er, niner) from the Big Finish website. Read it, enjoy it and spread the word…